Thinking about my MHA OCs, Hirohito Yasuda/Whisper and Aki Imai.
More specifically, thinking about how much Yasuda absolutely adores this odd little first year with her hallucinogen quirk and abysmal self esteem, and how that leads to them becoming a family.
Like. He took one look at her and went “is anyone gonna adopt that kid?” And then ignored the fact that she has living parents. That’s his little sister now, no takebacksies.
They spent a singular week together for Aki’s internship, and he already gave her his personal phone number and walked her back to school and nearly had a panic attack when he found out about the villains crashing summer training camp and called her nearly once a day to check on her afterwards until Jumpscare told him to dial it back a bit.
She texts him that she got her provisional license and he immediately starts scheming how he’s going to get on campus to celebrate. (Jumpscare tells him in no uncertain terms that he is to refrain from breaking into UA. They’ll celebrate with her when things are calmed down if she isn’t able to come back to them for her work-study. Yasuda thinks Jumpscare is being a spoilsport, but behaves himself anyway.)
They find out Aki’s coming back and he immediately puts all of that energy into planning a little celebration and getting everything prepared for when she arrives. He meets her at the train station and she’s barely off the train before he’s got an arm around her shoulders and is ruffling her hair and welcoming her home back.
She uses her quirk on a villain for the first time during work-study and he’s so gosh darn proud that he takes her for ice cream on their way back to UA after patrol (he insists on escorting her, since it’s dangerous and Class 1-A students are being targeted and all that jazz).
He finds out Aki got an offer from Sano’s murderer and has a legit panic attack, not only because it’s Sano’s murderer and that’s traumatic, but also because “she would’ve been killed if we hadn’t made our offer” and that mixes with him being absolutely livid because “she would’ve been killed if we hadn’t made our offer.”
(He goes back to calling her every day after that one.)
He finds out later on that her parents have basically nothing to do with her because of her quirk, so she isn’t even going home for Christmas, and he subsequently gets caught by Jumpscare while making plans to kidnap her. (Jumpscare is on board with having her over for Christmas btw, but maintains that they have to do it legally, and no, Hirohito, we cannot just kidnap her from UA.)
(Yasuda maintains that Jumpscare is a spoilsport. Jumpscare ignores him and reaches out to Aizawa to see about having Aki come visit them for Christmas.)
(A few weeks later and Yasuda is waiting at the station, practically vibrating with anticipation. They only get her for one day, and they’re gonna make sure it’s the best Christmas she’s had in years.)
(When Aki sits down at her spot at the table for tea time with Yasuda and Jumpscare, she does not cry when she realizes the cup in front of her has a Japanese violet motif and her hero name written on the side.)
He and Jumpscare go to all of her school events and he meets her friends and makes mental notes to get in touch with as many of their mentors as he can, because occasionally they need to cooperate with a more publicly recognized hero on things, and he thinks it would be nice for Aki to get to work with her friends.
(Cue a befuddled Hawks getting a message from a random underground hero because “my kid is friends with your kid.”)
Later on, when she’s older and graduates from UA (yes he was at the ceremony, yes he was insufferable about how proud he was, and yes Jumpscare was there to try and keep him from embarrassing Aki. Aki appreciated the support anyway), he pesters her about coming to join him and Jumpscare full time as an official sidekick. She agrees with very little convincing and he’s over the moon.
After the Christmas that she gets him the alexandrite earrings, he takes her out for a walk with hot drinks and tells her that his hair used to be short and he didn’t get his ears pierced until he was a second year at UA. He tells her about Sano’s death, what the piercings meant to him, and that his own long hair and piercings were (and still are) his way of carrying Sano with him. She tries to apologize for “intruding”, and he cuts her off and tells her that with the new pair she got for him (he wears them all the time now), it’s like he’s always carrying his whole family with him. He tells her Sano would’ve loved it, and not only that, but Sano would’ve loved her too.
When Aki comes to him later that week and asks about getting her ears pierced, he takes her to the place he had his done. They go a total of three times over the years, and her ears look like his now. She changes her earrings often, matching them to her mood or her outfit, and on occasion he finds himself stopping to look at the jewelry counter in stores to see if they have anything she’d like. He thinks Sano would’ve been better at this than him, that he would’ve understood Aki’s style much better then Yasuda ever could, but the smile on her face whenever he shows her his finds is enough to push those thoughts away for a while longer.
Aki changes her earrings often, but the simple silver hoops at her helix are a constant. (Yasuda had been anxious, the night he’d offered them to her. They were, after all, the pair he had bought himself with his first hero paycheck in order to complete Sano’s wish. He’d almost talked himself out of it. It was a weird thing to want to give somebody, and they were old, compared to the rest of her pieces, and worn, and perhaps a bit more plain and masculine than she might like. Jumpscare had pushed him, though, and so he had gone through with it despite his concerns.)
(He hadn’t been expecting the tears that followed, or the hug, or for that very same pair of earrings to become a permanent staple of her wardrobe.)
(He finds it brings a warmth to his chest, sharing something so small and yet so important to him with someone who means just as much.)
Just. Thinking about how he wholeheartedly throws himself into the role of co-mentoring this kid, and how he slowly becomes this odd amalgamation of a mentor/friend/brother/guardian and how it’s largely due to him that Aki is able to become comfortable with herself and her quirk and actually starts to believe she can be a hero too.
They become family, in the truest sense, and that’s something so precious to them both that it changes both of their lives forever.
Ajdjsjdjs I just love them okay. They’re my babies and they deserve the world <3
